The surge of inflation as economies recovered from the COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 took central bankers and most other observers by surprise. Canada was no exception. Year-over-year CPI inflation rose from -0.4 percent at its nadir in May 2020, to a peak of 8.1 percent in June 2022 before...

Over the past decade, inflation in many countries has been tepid, despite rock-bottom interest rates and different forms of unconventional stimulative monetary policy, including quantitative easing. For its part, Canada has averaged 1.5 percent inflation over this period, below the 2 percent...

The Bank of Canada should restore the important role of tracking the money supply as a predictor of future inflation and economic performance, according to a major new book on the conduct of monetary policy from the C.D. Howe Institute.In “Navigating Turbulence: Canadian Monetary Policy Since...

The Bank of Canada’s balance sheet has undergone a radical transformation since the beginning of the pandemic. The Bank’s total assets more than quadrupled at their peak and still remain 3.5 times higher. The most radical change on the liabilities side has been the increase in settlement...

This paper sets out to investigate two issues: first, it briefly provides a retrospective look at whether the stance of monetary policy was appropriate for hitting the Bank of Canada’s inflation target during 2018 and 2019, and second, it examines how to determine in real time whether monetary...

The current pandemic and the accompanying economic lockdowns have led to the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Fiscal and monetary authorities have acted in kind, with unprecedented stimulus and expansion of balance sheets. The Bank of Canada, for its part, dropped the...